


Love's Perfume

by TurtleTotem



Series: Tumblr Ficlets [8]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: Still Have Powers, M/M, Scents & Smells, secondary mutations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:43:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10043174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Erik bets Raven twenty bucks he won't find anything in her brother's scented-soap-and-candle shop that actually smells good. Easiest money he's ever made... right?(On Tumblrhere.)





	

“But mutant solidarity!” Raven said, and that’s when Erik knew he had lost. Never mind that he had never even met Raven’s brother, mutant or not; never mind that his own secondary mutation made the prospect of a scented-soap-and-candle shop completely abhorrent. Charles Xavier was the citys’s newest mutant small-business owner, and Erik and Raven were going to the grand opening.

“It can’t be that bad, at least it’ll be _good_ smells,” Raven said as they got into their cab. “Hey, Darwin, how you doing? We’re going to Charles’s new shop!”

“It’s _not_ good smells,” Erik said, sparing Darwin a friendly-ish nod as he grinned at them in the mirror. “Good smells are _real._ They occur naturally, they’re not cooked up in a vat and injected into cleaning products.”

“We talking about your secondary?” Darwin said as the cab pulled away from the curb. “You know, that’s never made sense to me, man. What does super-smell have to do with magnetism?”

“Ask Emma what diamonds have to do with telepathy, or Logan what claws have to do with his healing factor. On second thought, that would mean talking to Logan, so don’t bother.” He grimaced, looking around at the interior of the cab. “Your last fare had a ‘blooming onion’ for lunch and her date needs to lay off the cologne.”

“Got it in one!” Darwin laughed. “Seriously, though, who doesn’t like nice-smelling soap? Isn’t it better than smelling b.o.?”

“Now you’ve done it,” Raven said, but Erik cut her off.

“Everyone has b.o., all the time! Everyone has a scent, it’s just that most people are too stupidly nose-blind to notice it until it gets utterly rank. Even then, I’d rather smell a body being a body than the fog of alcohol, phthalates and whale vomit people try to disguise it with!”

“He has strong feelings about this,” Raven said apologetically.

_“Everyone_ has strong feelings about smells, whether they know it or not—do you know how strong a role scent plays in romantic attraction, in familial bonding, in memory retrieval—”

“Okay, Erik, we get it!”

“So why is Raven dragging your poor miserable nose to a scented soap store?” Darwin asked, sparing them a glance in the mirror as he stopped at a redlight.

“Because she’s sadistic.”

“Because my brother has worked his butt off to achieve his dream,” Raven said staunchly. “We need to support him. Besides, Erik, I have smelled Charles’s stuff and it really does smell _amazing,_ all of it! I bet you twenty bucks that you will find something in his store, even if it’s just one thing, that actually smells good to you.”

“Deal,” Erik said. “Easiest twenty bucks I ever made.”

—

_Greymalkin Soap & Candlemakers_ was done up to look very old-world elegant; the building was almost laughably picturesque, all brick and fancy architecture, with gas lamps burning outside the door. Even the Grand Opening banner looked to be made of fabric instead of plastic, draped gracefully above the door. Erik was a little impressed despite himself, which made him all the more irritable.

Not, however, as irritable as he became the moment they opened the door and stepped inside. He supposed some part of him had hoped against hope that Raven would be right and her brother’s scented items would be different somehow, but no—the place was every bit the expected overwhelming cloud of stinging chemical odors. He sneezed twice in quick succession, eyes watering.

“Twenty bucks,” Raven reminded him, almost pleadingly, when he stepped back toward the door. Erik growled and gave up the escape attempt.

“Come on.” Raven tugged at his arm. “Let me show you around.”

He shook her off. “Give me a minute to adjust.”

“Well… okay. I’ll go find Charles, so I can introduce you!”

She bounced off, and Erik tried to relax and let the cacophony of smells sort itself out in his head. The place was nice enough visually, keeping up the sense of old-timey beauty; his other mutation could confirm that the building was sturdy, at least, and a lot of things he might have expected to be plastic were showing up as metal. Charles would need to make a very tidy profit to keep a place this nice going.

On casual inspection, that didn’t look to be a problem; the shop was packed with people oohing and ahhing over the merchandise. Erik caught bits and pieces of conversation.

“Wow, it really does smell like fresh bread!”

“Feel how smooth this is.”

“Okay but who wants to come out of the shower smelling like the Hogwarts library?”

“I do!”

“'Elysian Fields,’ with notes of pomegranate—oh, I see what you did there.”

“How much is this? You know what, I don’t care, I’m getting it.”

“I’M GOING TO FAINT, THIS IS BETTER THAN MOUNTAIN LODGE!”

As he adjusted, Erik had to admit that, despite the scents being entirely too many and too concentrated, they had fairly little of the nose-searing alcohol edge exemplified by cheap perfumes. Charles Xavier was probably doing something right, as such things went. Still, none of the artificial odors particularly appealed to him.

Wait.

There _was_ something in this shop that smelled really, truly good. Erik closed his eyes, trying to pin it down, bring it out of the background chaos. It was a _real_ smell, organic, sweet yet earthy, like… sunshine on damp earth and tender green leaves. With maybe a touch of cinnamon roll.

He began tracking the scent, following it through the shop. Was it a candle? More likely a soap, he thought—there did seem to be a soapy note somewhere in there, clean and simple and fresh, though it was very subtle. Altogether it was frankly delicious; he’d be hard-pressed not to at least _try_ tasting the source when he found, no matter how obviously dumb an idea that was. The more he focused on it, the closer he got, the more he was convinced he could smell this scent forever and never tire of it.

He turned a corner, and _there_ was the source of the amazing scent, undeniable, another wave of it wafting off as… as Raven’s brother, the owner of the shop, swept a hand through the air in Erik’s direction.

“—right up there, you see, we’ve put it in a little cabinet just for aesthetic reasons. But to answer your question, yes, actually, the candles are technically edible—one hundred percent soy!—but I’m afraid they don’t taste good at all, even before adding the scent. Still, it’s nice to know that if your little tyke takes a bite, as tykes will do to any given object—”

Erik stared. He’d seen photos of Charles Xavier on Raven’s Instagram, and—well, frankly he’d thought the eyes were thanks to a filter. No. If anything they were even more surreal in person. And the photos hadn’t begun to capture his way of standing, neat and dapper and almost prim, even as he exuded delight and enthusiasm and a confidence that bordered on the smug. He was exactly the right height to tuck under Erik’s arm, his eyebrows were out of control and he _smelled amazing—_

“Erik, there you are!”

Erik hadn’t even noticed Raven standing on Charles’s other side. He made no protest as she took his arm and dragged him closer to Charles.

“Charles, this is my friend Erik, the one I told you about.”

“With the olfactory mutation? That’s absolutely fantastic!” Charles’s face had brightened even further, if that were possible, and he shook Erik’s hand with an enthusiasm that hid the fact that Erik almost forgot to shake back. “I’m terribly jealous, I can’t imagine what a help that would be to my work. Perhaps I should hire you on as a scent consultant or something, what would you think of that?”

“Actually, Erik usually finds this kind of thing overwhelming,” Raven said. “But of course he wanted to support your grand opening.”

“Well, that’s so sweet of you, Erik! I do hope you’ve found something that you liked?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Erik said, feeling a slow grin steal across his face. _And I was right about being horribly tempted to taste it as soon as I found it._

Was Charles… blushing? Erik had the sudden niggling unease that he’d forgotten something important about Raven’s brother’s mutation—but Charles was stepping closer, into Erik’s personal space, hands clasped behind his back to emphasize his surprisingly muscular chest. “Well,” he murmured, low and intimate, “I’d love to hear about… what you found. Perhaps over coffee, once the shop closes?”

“Oh, no, _really?”_ Raven muttered, but neither of them paid her any mind.

“I would love that,” Erik said, surprised by the way his pulse was fluttering at the thought of how sweet Charles would smell in a coffee shop, in the enclosed space of a cab, in Erik’s bedroom…

He and Charles had been standing there looking at each other for some time now, he realized when Raven pointedly cleared her throat.

“Yes, thank you for reminding me,” Erik said, and slipped her a twenty-dollar bill.


End file.
